


These Are Our Times

by Mercy



Series: Roadtripverse [7]
Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Italy, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series, Touring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-22
Updated: 2010-07-22
Packaged: 2017-11-02 16:15:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercy/pseuds/Mercy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something about an open window in a hotel in Rome, August 1998.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Are Our Times

**Author's Note:**

> Set to Beirut's [Postcards From Italy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzVbXeD_8E).

Rome is Jones's favourite yet. Dan's accused him of just liking the Vespa they've hired, which he does-- Dan refuses to drive it and even riding it makes him nervous, so there's a great deal of him clinging to Jones's waist, but that's not really why. Rome is loud, spectacularly loud. It's loud in a different way than London, a new loud that seems to taste of wine and sun and crumbling frescoes. It looks and smells loud. It's a big gorgeous shambles he wants to stand in the middle of and soak up.

Even their room is loud. There's a wedding reception going on in the courtyard, laughter and glass under the waltzing horns of the band. It's too hot to shut the window, really even too hot for clothes. Jones has discarded everything but his pants and Dan's on the bed wearing nothing but two days of stubble and the secondhand guitar he bought at a motley little market stall because Jones liked the look of the yellow roses painted onto the crackling veneer.

Jones is meant to be re-balancing a tone arm that got knocked askew in transit, but he keeps looking at Dan, who's idly picking and strumming along with the music outside, looking rarely serene. He's sorry now that he used the last Polaroid shot on a ludicrously fat man riding a tiny pink bicycle with a cart of vegetables on the back.

He goes to the window and watches the bride spinning round with what looks like her father. He wonders if he can remember how to waltz. His gran taught him when he was young, to foxtrot and jitterbug to old records wheezing out of a wind-up gramophone as old as her. He wonders if Dan knows how. They did dance together like Dan promised, once, a slow close sway to the shitty headlining DJ in Belfast, backed into the shadows and kissed themselves dizzy.

They haven't since. In London, Dan waves him off to dance on his own. They don't hold hands in London, don't half-fuck in bars, and Dan never touches him first. It stings but he's accepted it. This trip is because Jones was offered a three-night spot for more than he would have asked for, and it says enough for him that Dan dug up an excuse to come along. For now. But he's patient.

Jones waves back across the courtyard to a girl who's watching the party from her balcony in a slip and hair curlers. "Alright?" he calls. She says something back but he can't hear it.

"Who are you flirting with?" Dan asks. The note of jealousy behind the joke, that's enough for now too.

Jones ducks back in and pulls the curtains shut. The ends of them flutter weakly in not enough of a breeze. "The bride. Think the groom's Mafia, we'd best lock the door." He bounces onto the bed behind Dan and kisses the back of his neck. "You ought to've bought a mandolin."

"You didn't go all starry-eyed over a mandolin." He lets go of the guitar and leans back, running his hands up the backs of Jones's calves on either side of him. "Christ, you're like a furnace."

"It's hot! Anyway, you're all sticky." Dan's back is clammy and humid against his chest and his neck tastes of salt when Jones sucks at the spot behind his ear. "We should gatecrash the wedding party, they got all these massive fans down there."

"I hate weddings."

"What's to hate? Cake, champagne, pissed bridesmaids." He kisses the words onto Dan's throat. "You ever even been to one?"

"I was a groomsman in my cousin's. I would have preferred dental surgery."

Dan bats Jones's hands away from where they're inching towards his groin, or tries to, though it's not much of an effort. He's half hard in that fucked-out tired way that always makes Jones want to spend ages sucking his cock until he claws and shivers and his feet go numb. "Mmm, but I'd quite fancy you in a suit." He has to watch how he says things. _I'd love you in eyeliner_ made Dan look like a firing squad had turned up, and it was nothing to do with the eyeliner, even though no matter what Jones might feel, that wasn't what he meant by it. They didn't discuss it.

"In an undone suit in the coat-check room, knowing you."

"Against the ice sculpture, at least. I have got some class."

Applause and cheers drift into the window as the waltz ends and Dan pushes the guitar away and turns over onto his side. "It's too hot for this," he says before he kisses Jones anyway, soft and lazy with his fingers curling into the sweaty hairs at the nape of Jones's neck. The past three weeks, his hair's been a dark brown shot through with blue streaks that Dan (tipsy and post-coital) said matched his eyes, but he did it pink again when he found out Dan was coming with him. It's sort of tradition, maybe, at this point, rosy stains on the pillowcases and Dan's fingernails.

The music's gone into a lilting 4/4 with trumpets that Jones doesn't know how to dance to, not really, but it makes him hope there's some smiling girl down below swirling her skirts and stamping her feet back and forth and throwing her head back as she twirls. "Yeah, I reckon we could use an ice sculpture," he says in between gently sucking at Dan's lower lip.

Dan laughs low in his chest in time with the bass drum. He opens his eyes and smiles and yeah, Jones is pretty sure he can wait until Dan's got words to go with that look, until he'll look at Jones that way anytime and anywhere without shutting it away. Jones doesn't ask him to dance like he meant to, because this is better even in the heat with their skin sticking and no cool spots on the sheets.

Dan will smirk tomorrow at Jones's determination to get a kiss on the Spanish Steps, but he'll buy a postcard of them when he thinks Jones isn't looking and fountain-pen something accidentally wonderful onto the back, and for a little while enough will be more than enough.


End file.
